I am - by reason of a birthday party at the start of the month - doing the 5th Jan through the 5th Feb. So its been ten days and Jesus, Mary and Gay Joseph I'm bored.

The only inadvertent consolation is that it is winter and my enthusiasm for doing anything except pondering life's ultimate pointlessness is more than usually dulled. I am getting more writing done, though, and absolutely leaping through my to-do list of thrilling things like making my own Icelandic yogurt. NB: It wasn't particularly worth it, except for what insight it may give you on the Icelandic character.

Oh my God, for the first time ever I have logged in without even finishing the entire column to comment. LW3, I have been the exact other person in this exact relationship (Harrow) and had all my CLOSE friends, if you will, leave school the year ahead of me and OH GOD thinking now of how mortifyingly awful the letters I wrote were - this was in 1996, so we still did that, letter-writing.

It is going to be rough but I suspect that your friend - if he is actually gay - is writing these letters and focusing his feelings on you as a test of how he can feel these things in a safe-ish context. I fell crazily in love for about 2 and a half seconds apiece with a series of boys during my final year - who I could more or less only communicate with via letters and occassional phone calls and perhaps see fleetingly at Christmas and I look back now in such thanks that they were so nice to me and so patient.

Your friend almost certainly knows you are straight, and I think almost certainly knows you aren't in love with him, and probably - not to insult you, as I'm sure you are very fit - isn't in love with you. Popular teenage culture has changed a lot, but the kind of easily contextualized and culture-appropriate things straight boys go through with girls is much more formal and deliberate and a bit delayed-onset for Us Gays.

Be patient with him, be nice to him, very firmly do not allow him to fondle your wang unless you mean it and in two years he'll have a serious boyfriend and access to really amazing parties and in ten years you'll sit in a cafe somewhere and laugh-argue about this while your kids get in trouble somewhere just out of vision.

Good luck! It will work out! Enjoy your university years and Don't Do (too many) Drugs!

This is relevant to my interests: I got divorced about four months ago and still run into former 'couple' friends the S.O. got in the divorce and its always forced and odd and I both think and try not to think about what the final judgement on me has been.

"Often drunk Petit Prince, surprisingly good to have at parties and mysteriously without almost any personal possessions."

@fabel I have a very long history of complex and disordered eating and, after huge initial resistance, I took up food diarying and found it oddly great. Once I admitted that I'm already obsessed continuously with what I'm eating, the tracking of it actually gave me a "place" to hold that obsessiveness and a time to do it. I do have to work at not going overboard, but I have to do that anyway, so it actually can work and can reveal things that you pretend to yourself you aren't doing (like living off one-third of a chocolate chip cookie and zero calorie Red Bull all day before drinking too much and then collapsing face-first into a cheeseburger).

This is probably the most appropriate place I can think of to confess that I have extremely complex feelings about how attractive I think Oscar Pistorius is. I start thinking about how hot he is, and then I think about how I'd completely do him "despite" his legs, then I think that's terrible because its not "despite" at all, but its also not "because" of his legs because its also not a fetish of mine, not that its wrong to fetishize it, unless it sometimes is and after a while my brain melts down and I loop right back to the beginning of "but he's really cute." Sigh.

The comments over on Salon make me so grateful there is a place like the Hairpin where the comments are not just so endlessly negative. There are a few good ones in there, but I think the Hairpin is the only place I go where I am consistently as excited to read the comments as I am the post itself.

Also, I thought the Salon piece was quite good, if still slightly confusing. I suppose now I need to read the book!

@insouciantlover The lavender thing might still work. There's a woman who works in my building with a bob of grey hair and she often dyes a strip of it a very unusual colour. My fave was a teal-on-black combo that made her look like the world's most amazing Japanimation superhero/fashion editor.

@Killerpants I'm surprised no one else has said it. I love all these ladies so much! I kind of want Anjul to sit by me all day and tell me all of what I'm seeing always all the time because I feel like she has a much MUCH clearer and more detailed understanding of reality than I do! All my dreams are in montage!

@Toby Jug Just logged in to lend support and say this is exactly what I do as well. Oddly, I often come to think the lie is actually more "true" than the truth, which seems too mundane and fails to reflect the way I really see the situation. Trying to get over that and find my own life as interesting enough to be honest about.

If you haven't read Zadie Smith's amazing essay Speaking in Tongues, it actually kind of helped me understand or frame some of what I was up to: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/feb/26/speaking-in-tongues-2/

Also, those Don Draper episodes almost killed me when watching them, I WAY over identified.